An alternative method to skimming a full paper is to read a shortened representation of the paper's content in the form of a summary.
An author-provided summary is de facto included with each paper as an abstract, which researchers often read before continuing to the rest of the paper.
Automated summarization has garnered significant interest from the natural language processing community, and extractive and abstractive methods for generating summaries from long-form documents have been developed over the years [1]}, [2]}, [3]}.
Some methods have even been proposed for generating extreme (single sentence) summaries, called TLDRs, from full papers [4]}.
